JUST ANY PRONOUND ANYWHERE? PRONOUNS AND "NEW " DEMONSTRATIVES IN NORWEGIAN1

In this paper, I investigate whether the pronominal system of feminine pronouns in Oslo Norwegian – one of very few pronouns to have seeemingly retained some case distinctions – is still a case system. An alternative might be that just any pronoun can occur just anywhere, i.e., that there is a free choice. The investigation has been conducted using new and older spoken language material. I have found two things. First, there is no free choice between the pronouns; while the nominative one can be used in almost any position and with any syntactic function, the accusative one is more limited. The second finding is exciting: The Norwegian deictic system is more complex than hitherto known. In addition to spatial deixis, there is also grammatically encoded psychological deixis.